Advertising Jingles Are Enduring Just Fine in the Internet Age

Jingles for advertising have been around at least since the Victorian era, when wandering street merchants used speech and melody to attract attention and bring in customers. But it wasn't until the 20th century and the widespread adoption of radio as an advertising medium that the advertising jingle really rose to prominence, with a language all its own. The truth is, simple, short snippets of music and verse stick in people's mind, gaining free "airplay" in the minds of customers every day. Radio station jingles could be just the thing to take your ad campaign to the next level.

A Great Jingle Transcends Economic Conditions

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, radio station jingles really took hold, particularly lively jingles that momentarily took radio listeners' minds off the economic woes of the time. It doesn't matter whether your radio jingle is introduced when the Dow is up or down. If it's catchy, it will be effective. One Pepsi Cola jingle of 1939 managed to saturate airwaves, and was even distributed as a phonograph record, delivered to jukeboxes everywhere. Kids picked it up and sang it at home, and if you have a kid, you know it's not easy to "mute" them.

No Genre Is Off-Limits

Early jingles for advertising stuck with traditional musical styles, but today advertisers aren't afraid to reach out with cutting edge musical styles, and they aren't married to a single genre. Country, jazz, psychedelic rock, and hip-hop all have a place in the jingle writer's repertoire. Whatever your product and target demographic, you can have a jingle written that's designed to engage exactly who you want to engage (and probably many others as well). The best jingle writing operations know how to match genre, music, and words to achieve exactly the effect companies want in their advertisements.

Technology Allows Local Jingle Writers to Shine

One of the greatest benefits of living in an interconnected world is that great jingle writers aren't just found in major cities like New York and Los Angeles. Composers from all over work with creative firms throughout the country, giving jingle writing companies access to an enormous pool of talent and allowing the form to change in ways that weren't though possible just a decade ago. The internet also helps keep overhead costs down, so that more businesses than ever can afford to commission a jingle and reap the benefits when it goes "viral."

Jingles Are Still Around Because They Work

Advertising jingles are still used regularly for one main reason: they work. Most of us are familiar with the mental process of singing a jingle to ourselves while writing down the phone number mentioned in it. And parents know just how attached kids can get to advertising jingles, singing them over and over. Jingles have come a long way since the simple, folksy compositions of the radio age. But they are still amazingly effective advertising tools. If you haven't considered including an ad jingle as part of your latest advertising campaign, perhaps you should reconsider. Your jingle could be the next to go viral.